IT'S YOU THAT I WANT TO KISS

Boy meets girl, girl steals diamonds, boy and girl take it on the lam in this overripe slice of unsugared Cain from prolific Jakubowski. As you'd expect from the author of the dementedly fetishistic tales in Life in the World of Women (p. 422), the principals have no personal histories that matter, and they scarcely cast shadows outside a succession of cross-country beds. He's Jacob Jones, a Brit who has wandered to Miami to mourn the death of his partner Lynda from an unattended ectopic pregnancy; she's Anne Ryan, another Brit, who's just turning from modeling and escorting to serious felony by muling diamonds for an unholy trinity of dopers: Teddy Caliban, the Man from Caracas, and his henchman Evil. But when the French twins in charge of passing the diamonds to Anne molest her, she retaliates by going freelance with the booty—and with Jacob, whom she first bedded a few hours before getting her final briefing from Evil and Co. As the two twisted innocents take off for New Orleans and points west, one jump ahead of implacable Evil and a vacationing waitress he's picked up, it seems obvious that Jakubowski is just using the eminently predictable plot as a soft-core framework for copious interludes of rough sex (the permutations are endless, though the couplers consistently use their bodies to hurt and betray each other). Miraculously, though, by the time Jacob and Anne reach Seattle, even the rawest appetites seem to have been burned as deeply from their story as from their bodies, and what's left is perversely tender. Extending the trajectory from Double Indemnity to Basic Instinct, Jakubowski seems to have perfected a new genre: naked noir.